Save It and Save Yourself: Books

I don't know if any comprehensive studies have been done, but I think it's a safe bet to throw this out there as fact: the younger your students, the shorter the lifespan of the books that are anywhere in their vicinity.

Now, believe me, I am the first proponent of that new book smell, though I prefer the musty smell of old books. I can admit that I have listed a books smell as one of the deciding factors of my purchase. But I also don't have to box up my e-books so my cat won't chew on their covers.

This is a wave of the future that many book lovers have had trouble embracing, even as book-like as marketers try to make their product. About a dozen programs have a feature that allows you to press the screen with your finger to turn the page. Hmm. Not a big selling point for me.

In fact, one of the biggest reasons I usually print stuff out even if I have a digital version is so I can make notes on it or dog-ear my place. Well, if you thought you could only do this on real, physical paper, you were wrong!

The site Mobipocket not only offers a wide selection of e-books to download, but it allows you to download them to your smartphone or BlackBerry for free. While it has yet to include an app for iPhone, the much more famous Kindle program from Amazon.com offers this, also for free, while Kindle users are waiting on a BlackBerry version!

What's even better--both versions allow you to download samples before purchasing. For an ESL class, a single sample like this can provide more than enough material for a day's scanning lesson or in-depth reading homework.

But for book addicts, that probably won't be enough. Mobipocket's e-books are about $8 a piece, which is a lot better than most paperbacks, but there are many sites that offer free e-books, some for classic literature now in the public domain, some with new work by aspiring authors, and some with a nice blend of both. The best known of these is The Gutenburg Project, which provides tens of thousands of free books as well as editing services if you want to submit your own.

Other free sites include Feedbooks, Scribd.com, and ManyBooks.

The ability to upload your own material provides a great project opportunity--having students write poems or short stories for publication. They will not only have something to show others for their effort, but you will have reading material for the classes that come later. Short stories may seem like a lot of work for less advanced students, but be sure to look up "nanofiction" if they give you too much grief.

Another great site is DailyLit, which sends a 5 minute excerpt from a book of your choice to your e-mail. This is a great way to help make larger readings more manageable for students or to let students focus on specific chunks for discussion.

Finally, if you have books you just couldn't live without but which may never reach the public domain (the way Congress keeps extending copyright duration), then a last resort option is always to scan them in as pdfs. Many scanners can now do this with the push of a button... well about 300 pushes in all?

Sure, it sounds tedious, but if you have a student teacher, then you can always just say it's the new wave of education. They'll need to get used to it, so why not practice with your library?

ELL-Designed Information

In my limited high school experience, the most important things in laying out a newspaper is space and marketability. You need to make sure the story fits, and you need to make sure it's understandable. Our instructor's advice was to write every article as if you were writing it to a child in about fifth grade. Usually, smaller words help save space, too!

Unfortunately, my more extensive experience in reading the newspaper is that most journalists don't follow this advice, especially now that the Internet provides limitless space for their articles. Many times, article-reading can turn out to be very similar to searching for a word in the encyclopedia or dictionary. Trying to understand one thing ends up trying to understand a chain of different things.

For learners of other languages, this can be an extremely frustrating experience. Luckily, there are several sites that shape the articles for ELLs, such as The Bangkok Post: Easy English News and the Simple English Wikipedia. Both simplify existing articles that can be compared to the original if you want, and the Bangkok post also has listening components.

The Bangkok post is designed for locals in Thailand. It has glosses of difficult words in English and Thai. The news is also more relevant to that region, but it can easily be expanded into a culture lesson or related to news relevant to your own students. For example, the article on smuggling could be related to the problems America had with Britain just before the Revolutionary War or to the more recent standoffs America has had with pirates.

Or for my own EFL setting, I could have students discuss their experiences with knock offs brought in from China, shoddy bootleg DVDs, or the Russian Mafia. I find it very difficult to watch V for Vendetta in Russian with the same guy dubbing all the male and female roles!

The Simple English Wikipedia, on the other hand, is designed to be readable by children and adults learning English. I figured the best way to test its usability would be to look up psychology:

Psychology is the study of human behavior, thought, and feeling. It deals with all actions and reactions of people. Because behavior is difficult to study as a whole, psychologists often only look at small parts of it at a time. Psychology overlaps with many other fields including Medicine, Biology, Computer Science and Linguistics.

Not bad! Even without reading the whole article, I think students will find these explanations more helpful than short dictionary entries. And if this version is even half as addictive as the full version of Wikipedia, your students will be reading junkies in a week! I also love that encyclopedias give students the opportunity to discover things in the target language that they didn't even know about in their L1. Just yesterday it helped a Portuguese student discover the walrus. After reading about it in English, he could click the Portuguese button on the left and read a similar entry in his native language-- after which he was certain he'd never heard of this majestic creature!

Stories in Steps

In reading, vocabulary is key, and in learning vocabulary, repetition and context are the keys! I think we all know that the door to SLA has a whole lot of locks on it!

I really like the reading activities available on the California Distance Learning Project web site and Forrest Lunn's ESL site because they provide a sort of reading skeleton key! (Okay, keys and locks are getting old, I know). Both these sites offer students the option to read a text in a natural version or an easier version.

While the natural version feel authentic in a journalistic sense, the easy versions used simplified grammar and vocabulary and also use a lot of repetition to keep students from becoming confused. The familiarity can also help them figure out other words in the sentence.

In the year 1986 there was a terrible explosion. The explosion was at a nuclear power plant in the another country called Ukraine. The radiation caused a lot of damage. It contaminated the soil and other things. People lived in the area when the explosion happened. Twenty years later those people are still suffering. Effects from the explosion will go on for a long time. -"Children From Russia Spend Summers in California"

Even if students find this version easy to read, it can help them figure out more difficult sections of the authentic text. Or, being a bit of a sadist, I wouldn't mind asking students to practice more complex grammar structures like clauses by rewriting the article without the repetition.

The effects of the April 26, 1986 explosion and meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet-controlled Ukraine persist 20 years later. Contaminated soil and the lingering fallout from the explosion's radioactive cloud continue to spawn serious health concerns across several western former Soviet states like Belarus, where experts estimate more than 60 percent of Chernobyl's nuclear fallout settled. -authentic article

Of course, it also helps that the sites provide vocabulary learning activities, such as matching games with listening components. For the articles, both sites also provide accompanying dictations, which are especially helpful with English's fun orthography. When students learn a new word from the context of the stories, it would make it stick if they can pronounce it and use it in conversation. Too frequently, I've settled on a lesser word even in my L1 because I'm not sure how to pronounce it. (Taciturn-- is it an s or a k? I can never remember!)



Both sites also provide numerous ways for teachers to test comprehension. There are vocabulary quizzes, content quizzes, and even spelling quizzes! On the California site, these exercises smack of rote learning to me, but the aspect of interaction can still make them useful.

Lunn's site provides much more thoughtful activities more appropriate for advanced students. First off, many of the stories are paired with similar ones, which makes them great for comparison discussions or exercises. And while the follow-up activities aren't electronic (aside from the quizzes), they are more integrative of the four skills. I also think his vocabulary exercises are more useful in setting up new words in students' schemata. One has them sort words according to whether they are negative, positive, or neutral.

Either of these sites would be great resources for integrating vocabulary-building with reading and listening.

Bad Designs for Consumers, Great for EFL!

I've already spent a ridiculous amount of time on the site Bad Human Factor Designs. It is both a celebration of human ingenuity... and stupidity in all the best ways.

Each entry discusses a design, usually for a simple, everyday item, which should be very simple but becomes overcomplicated by Man in his infinite wisdom. The entries also provide explanatory pictures that will help students through the text. And while there are some unexpected words, the author's sarcastic, journalistic approach to each topic makes it a very easy read.
Many entries also deal with problems that foreign language learners are likely to encounter.

Several center on travel, such as how to open the sealed toothpaste bottles that airlines give you, confusing bathroom and kitchen utility designs, and how to navigate the controls on cluttered gas pumps. I wish there had been a Russian equivalent, when I was trying to figure out the flusher in St. Petersburg...

The format of each entry is also helpful for students. Each explains the problem with the design and then offers suggestions for fixing it. Below that are reader comments. This makes for an easy discussion in class or a short writing assignment. What is the problem with the design? How does the author suggest fixing it? Are there other solutions you can think of? How does the design of this particular thing differ in Russia? Have you ever had a similar problem? These could also be prediction questions for before the reading. I definitely think it would be a fun warm up activity.

As a follow up assignment to warm up the next day, students could also write about design problems they have experienced in their own life. Keyboards, for example. The Russian Cyrillic alphabet has more letters than the Latin alphabet that English-speakers use. That means more keys, right?

Wrong. It means that for some keys, instead of a bracket you get a hard sign. Of course, you can easily program a little code to, for example, press Ctrl + R + U to change your computer between Russian keys and English keys, but that's a lot of work for one bracket. And what about remembering the keys when they are marked with English letters? One solution that I've seen the most for this is stickers that go over English keys to mark where the Russian letters are. As Russo-Centric as the country used to be, I would have figured that they had specifically designed Russian keyboards. What happened to them?

Luckily for our purposes, these are good things! Students in my particular age range (teens and young adults) will be eager to complain about anything! So while I get them honing their writing and reading skills, I can also let them blow off some steam on the petty annoyances of everyday life.

Book Jacket Predictions

Our teachers and parents always told us not to judge a book by its cover--usually before having us read a very boring book. While this idea is a good maxim to live by in general, my experience tends to be that publishers spend more on fancy covers for books they know are going to sell (the interesting ones).



That gave me an idea for a fun classroom activity. Bring up (or print out, depending on your resources or level. Print outs will be helpful for additional reads at home and for providing word glosses, but the online version may feel more interactive to students in class.) Amazon.com or your e-bookstore of choice. On Amazon, under each genre tab customers see the covers of six or so of the latest books. These new releases also frequently have the "look inside" feature that allows you to read the first few pages.

Together, teachers can use these features to have students predict what they think will happen in the book. First, show them the cover. For a larger class, I would prefer to have them work in groups and discuss the picture, so each group will come up with their own interpretation. There, they will have to discuss clues that cue them in on whether the book is fiction or nonfiction, and what sort of world they have to play with. Then they can write down their results. When the class is regathered, students can take turns reading from the excerpt provided. Testing their comprehension of it is the fun part!

Have the students write what they think will happen. The scholastic part, of course, will be a summary of their version with supporting clues from the text, but I think the fun part is asking them to include a climactic scene or a turning point in the story. With their own creativity at work in it, students will probably put more work into their summary, too!

The American Harry Potter covers would be great for this exercise because students would already be familiar with the characters and dimensions of the world. Unfortunately, these books have become so popular that they are probably also familiar with the plot! Similar series that are less popular, however, include Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Gregor the Overlander, and Artemis Fowl.

I think young adult fantasy and science fiction would probably yield the most varied results, the most interesting covers, and the most appropriate reading level. After all, what could be a better follow up activity than to read the book and compare the results?

Or in the case of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, students can make these predictions... make a few more based on the movie trailer... read the novel... compare it to traditional Greek myths... and then maybe even compare the book to the movie when it comes out! Or while you're getting into it, you could just take them on a vacation to Greece! (Can I join your class?)

Deviant ELLs

On the Internet today there are sites for every interest imaginable, from babies to skateboarding. These are nearly universal, and for English speakers, they are easily accessible online.

My own interests are in art and science fiction, and luckily Deviant Art has attracted artist from several nations, and the forum makes it easy to find them and strike up a conversation. Just today, there are call outs on the Deviant Meet Board to "Deviants" in London, Barcelona, Denton, Ekatarinburg, Venice, Sydney, New York City, India, the Philippines, and more! In my foreign language studies, I've actually run across several Russian and German speakers who just by chance joined the same interest groups as me on the site. This has really improved my writing ability, even if the subject is a drawing of a psychotic, one-eyed samurai who fights aliens.

But regardless of one's own artistic ability, it is easy to get started on this site even just as an observer and to search for art relating to one's interests. Photographers in particular tend to flood their sections with pictures of, say, their Chow. And Chow owners tend to be very enthusiastic about their dogs, so they will be glad to tell you all about them! Or for the more serious student, there is also a section in the forum for political discussion.

Wherever the conversation will be taking place on the site, it is guaranteed a quick response. On the forum, responses are immediate, while personal notes or comments to artists may require a two day wait or more. But a response of some sort is almost certain, and this, I think is the most important part of writing ability. Just like listening is important for speaking, reading is important for writing. To keep up with their new virtual pen pals, students will need to read their reply... and depending on the age and socioeconomic status of the artist, that could be difficult. And even if they happen to be Harvard graduates, recipients are unlikely to provide any correction.

To ensure this interaction (and the ability to monitor what sort of "deviant" input students are receiving), teachers can even create a section for themselves and post pictures or poems for students to comment on. Of course, it will have to be original material, so strap your creativity boots on!

A common strategy for clubs on the site is to allow members to submit their material for publication on the club page. (The administrator will simply save their picture or file and resubmit them there as an original production of the club members as a whole). This could provide a fun project for the class, where students could take turns posting pictures of their surroundings or interests, write a description of them, and wait to reply to comments provided by their peers. Teachers could even connect with other ESL classes this way and invite them to join in the fun! This is also a great way to have students expand on their vocabulary by drawing from their peers' differing interests.